The University of California is financed through taxes allotted to it by the Legislature in Sacramento. This money finances 10 very different campuses. Berkeley is the oldest, founded in 1866, and Merced the newest, opened in 2005. While the rationale or need for so many campuses is a contested and interesting issue, it is also interesting to reflect on how these differences may impact on the student experience. During a recent trip to UC Irvine I witnessed how profound the physical differences are. While Berkeley feels like ‘spontaneous order’ (to borrow Hayek’s phrase), Irvine is carefully planned. Berkeley is full...

Standing under what is probably the only oak tree left in Oakland, I could see the large white City Hall building in front of me. I could also see thousands of people of different ages and races, mostly of the middle class-looking variety. What I couldn’t see was Barack Obama during his twenty minute speech. He spoke clearly and with less polish than some politicians, covering most of the typical topics. I appreciated that he laid out his ideas in a way that was understandable. Domestically, he wants to do certain things. However, he can’t do them until we get...

An alarming, potentially disastrous agricultural mystery has unfolded quietly over the past few months. Honeybees – the United States chief pollinator – have been leaving their hives in droves, never to return. Beekeepers across the country have declared up to 70% losses in their colonies, and there is currently no clear answer as to why. Honeybees – a rare example of a non-native species which has proven itself useful – account for up to 100% of the pollination of some crops. Almonds, for example, are pollinated entirely by honeybees – and California, where the vast majority of the US almond...

The regulation of certain scientific and technological applications sometimes relies on building scenarios that range from ‘worst case’ to ‘best case’. Scenarios like this make it easier to make comparisons and balance costs and benefits of different kinds of regulation. At one point in the late 1990s and early 2000s the scenarios around genetically modified organisms (GMOs) seemed to range from apocalypse to utopia; from novels like Crichton’s Next to scientists’ convictions that GMOs would provide cures to intractable health conditions. While the controversy has died down, two events this week remind us that there continue to be risks of...

With Animal Liberation (1973), Peter Singer launched the animal rights movement. Twenty years later, a professor at Princeton and one of the most influential philosophers of our time, Singer continues to play the traditional intellectual in a flagrant, almost obtuse way. He does not miss an opportunity to unsettle our ‘self-evident’ truths and challenge our thought processes. In sum, his writings will not leave you indifferent and I highly recommend them. On January 26 Singer wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times in favor of medical intervention to keep a severely mentally impaired 9-year old girl, Ashley, from...